The old man on a bench in a village near Kangra
A few houses with slate-tiled roofsAnd a deserted chai-kiosk some distance awayWe stopped before a fork in the roadWhere an old man sat on a benchLooking up through a tree, it seemed. Delhi to Palampur is a long driveThrough the conflict of busy thoughtsThat dash, zoom, dip, and diveAnd are forever connecting dots. I shut...
The wireless headphone that is gentle on the wallet and the ears
Some days are created to be full of interesting discoveries. Like today. One political party discovered that even exit polls could be sane as well as deadly. Another party found out finally that repeating a magical performance isn’t as difficult as it sounds. And I wondered why I hadn’t activated the Blaupunkt BH01 wireless on-ear...
All that SAREGAMA fails to address
‘Where on earth are pa-dha-ni-sa?’ asked a friend and because I wasn’t aware if he was really talking about musical notes, I asked, ‘What? I mean, are you into music now?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am talking about the Saregama Caravan, that expensive gadget that I now call digital waste.’ A couple of hours of...
Experience the freedom
No, this post is neither about the slogan decibels at JNU nor about the misplaced sense of patriotism by goons. This one is simply an attempt to talk about the way ‘make in India’ is being milked. Does this ring a bell? ‘Make in India’, I guess is all about the policy music used to...
What if… everyone wrote but no one read anything
What if I were a drop of water on a planet where there was just water and nothing else. No birds flying in the air, no fish testing the under-current, no micro-organisms waiting for their turn to die and get reborn as a human. Just water everywhere and I, a little drop bobbing up and...
Conversations with virtual reality
Conversations with what is real and what is unreal has a sibling now… the universe of virtual reality. Even Zuckerberg wrote in March 2014 that the day isn’t far when ‘we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people’. Geoff Mulgan declares that ‘as the...
You aren’t going to fade away – 1
You aren’t going to fade away just as DSLRs aren’t going to be extinct. Neither are books disappearing… nor our daily newspapers on their way out. To fade out is not their destiny. ‘The pager disappeared, didn’t it?’ pointed out Specky, my wife. ‘Yes, it did,’ I replied, ‘after all even Dodos aren’t with us...
The magical marriage app
Well, you may not believe this but navigation through technology for the music of a peppy marriage is possible. All you need is an imaginary app (because no has yet thought of creating one that my rhyming couplets talk about) to make it all happen. And if this really happens, all one can say with...
And then a poem got some words
Poetry, like music, happens all the time Within us and outside us But not everyone pauses long enough To notice thoughts that follow a feather floating in the air Or eyes that blink a coded message Moments come and go like ocean tides, only faster They hardly have the patience to linger I think they...
Men in the kitchen are like consultants for organisations
‘Men don’t cook’ is a fallacy. ‘Men can’t cook’ is a puerile whine. ‘Men must not cook’ is unintelligent. ‘Men can cook’ is similar to what harmony, rhythm and beat are for music. This chorus of not wanting men around in the kitchen because they cannot cook is as funny as the Congress shouting itself...
Of bloggers and blunders
God in his infinite wisdom decided to place bloggers and blunders only a vowel away from each other in the dictionary. You don’t think there is anything in this that needs to be taken seriously… right? You feel this is simply another chronology coincidence that I have stumbled upon and that, like the media, I...
The inaudible language of the heart
This morning as I sat in front of the television watching the telecast of the Republic Day parade on Rajpath, I found it as engrossing as the best film I have ever watched. I was literally glued to my chair and even sat upright in ‘savdhan baith’ (at attention) position as the National Anthem was...
